Japanese car manufacturers starting to concentrate on strengthening the ADAS system

Japanese car manufacturers starting to concentrate on strengthening the ADAS system

In summer of 2016 the Japanese car manufacturers have strengthened their mass production of the ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System). Among them, Nissan is the most aggressive manufacturer. Nissan's autonomous driving system is named “ProPILOT”. The new Nissan “SERENA” is the first vehicle to adopt the “ProPILOT”. The autonomous driving system in the SERENA is currently just for same lane automatic driving. Nissan includes the advanced ADAS as their autonomous driving system and the plan is to deploy the same lane automatic driving in their car for 2016. Nissan plans to add multi lane automatic driving in 2018 with higher technology autonomous driving systems to follow in 2020.

Some media sources say “SERENA's ProPILOT is just for the same lane automatic driving. Because of this it should only be included in the ADAS category and should not be considered an autonomous driving system. Furthermore the naming could cause issues because of potential misunderstands to users that do not understand the difference between the ProPILOT specification and a completely autonomous driving system”. Nissan took objection to these media sources and said “In order to eliminate any misunderstanding, we have been educating and training all of our dealers thoroughly”.

One of the basic technologies Nissan is adopting for “same lane” automatic driving is the image recognition technology provided by Mobileye, a professional Israel image recognition company. Mobileye is also providing their image recognition related analytic technology to GM, Volvo and Audi. A monocular camera hardware is used with Mobileye's technology. The manufacturers of the monocular camera are large Western companies. Nissan is using TRW's American ZF product. Other car manufactures are using a millimeter wave radar plus a monocular camera for front environment recognition, however Nissan is using a monocular camera only.

Groupement ADAS is a Team of innovative companies with over 20 years experience in the field of technologies used in assistance driver systems (design, implementation and integration of ADAS in vehicles for safety features, driver assistance, partial delegation to the autonomous vehicle).